Ellis supporter reacts to commenters, endorsement

When Macon-Bibb Commissioner Mallory Jones wrote a piece April 28 calmly promoting C. Jack Ellis’s opponent in the ongoing tax commissioner’s race, The Telegraph’s comment board lit up with the most stunning vitriol I’ve seen locally on such boards — not in favor of Jack’s opponent, but bashing Jack on genuinely unfounded rumors like the one Neal Boortz desperately had to retract. Someone quickly scrubbed The Telegraph’s board, presumably to protect against legal action. The hatred of Jack, though, spelled out in published libel, was plain to see.

Did Jack make some serious mistakes as mayor? Absolutely. Which mayor hasn’t? I’ve monitored five other Macon mayors, each one occasionally blundering — Lee Robinson, Tommy Olmsted, David Carter, Jim Marshall and Robert Reichert. Yet none of them got the wild, unfounded flak Jack got on that comment board April 28.

As Jack’s legal counsel, I recoiled on his behalf. But Jack himself just blew it off. He’s used to it.

So when The Telegraph on May 15 endorsed Jack’s opponent as expected, I was curious about the logic. None of the seething undercurrents were evident, and the editorial on its surface roughly alluded to the substantive issues in the race — blighted, tax-delinquent properties that have been condemned before foreclosure due to longstanding neglect (or deliberate indifference) by the tax commissioner’s office; and garbage fee collection.

Yet the paper’s discussion was thoroughly muddled, suggesting the possibility of some unstated logic for opposing Jack, perhaps along the lines of the comment boarders. Rather than detail the editorial’s many errors, let me note that Georgia law requires liens to be placed on tax-delinquent properties, but not for delinquent garbage fees. So the present tax office’s policy of letting property tax delinquencies languish on 1,137 properties that eventually were condemned as hopeless, while foreclosing on 42 garbage fee delinquencies, seems odd.

It’s pretty outrageous to imply, as a commenter on the editorial reasonably read the editorial, that Jack would not enforce the property tax lien law as commissioner through earlier foreclosures of potentially blighted properties held by slumlords, heirs and absentees. Au contraire, Jack is the only candidate calling for quicker tax-delinquency foreclosures as envisioned by law.

What’s more, Jack has the only proposal out there to address the $7 million garbage fee hole. His point that you can’t foreclose on garbage fee delinquencies when you don’t try to collect them until 36 months after delinquency, and even then can’t be assured the supposed fees were properly due to begin with, shows Jack’s sensitivity simultaneously to the law, collection practicalities, the property owners being targeted (many of whom were not using garbage service), and the dysfunctional garbage fee billing process in the Public Works Department.

The Telegraph revealed its bias against Jack when it went light on his opponent, who expressed cluelessness to the Editorial Board about the question of when his own office had foreclosed 42 times on the garbage fee delinquencies; and when the board touted Wade McCord’s 10-percent collection delinquency on garbage fees when that is about four times worse than the garbage fee collection rates in Gwinnett and Fulton counties.

The Telegraph went further overboard for Jack’s opponent when it outrageously implied that Jack as mayor had himself caused the garbage fee problem. Contrary to expectation, Jack as mayor began responsibly privatizing and collecting for such services — a concept that Mayor Reichert later completed with no objection from the newspaper.

The Telegraph also gratuitously deprecated Jack, a two-year Vietnam combat vet, as a “Vietnam era” veteran, as if Jack hadn’t seen hot fire in ‘Nam.

The Telegraph concluded by saying it wanted a “quiet” tax commissioner. But if quiet means fostering blight and continuing absurd collection policies like waiting for 36 months to dun a garbage deadbeat, we need some noise instead. Like him or not personally, Jack is uniquely tuned to the ways that our local government’s different parts might work together for change so that every citizen can rest better assured that taxes are being fairly levied and paid by one and all, without regard to race, creed or color.

Dave Oedel is a law professor at Mercer University Law School.

None of the comments from the endorsement editorial for the tax commissioner’s race were “scrubbed” and the editorial also plainly stated the garbage fee collection problem started in 1993.

This story was originally published May 19, 2016 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Ellis supporter reacts to commenters, endorsement."